McGovern and Hahamovitch named National Humanities Center Fellows

Two William & Mary professors, Cindy Hahamovitch of history andCharles F. McGovern of American studies, have been chosen as National Humanities Center Fellows for the 2013-14 academic year.

The two are the eighth and ninth members of the William & Mary faculty to be selected as National Humanities Center Fellows. This is also the third time in the past three years that a William & Mary faculty member has been chosen.

Only one other professor from a Virginia institution was selected.

Hahamovitch was awarded the John E. Sawyer Fellowship and will work on a project entitled, Guestworkers, Governments, and the Global History of Human Trafficking.

She is the author of No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and Global History of Deportable Labor, which won the Merle Curti Award for the best book in social history, the James A. Rawley Award for the best book in race relations and the Taft Labor History Book Award.

She is review editor for Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas and the past president of the Southern Labor Studies Association.

McGovern was awarded the Kent R. Mullikin Fellowship and will work on a project entitled, The Civics of American Popular Music: Citizenship, Race, and Belonging, 1930-1972.

McGovern is the author of Sold American: Consumption, and Citizenship, 1890-1945. He co-edited the collection Getting and Spending: Twentieth Century European and American Consumer Societies. He has written essays on the politics of folk and popular culture, the electric guitar, Woody Guthrie, advertising and other subjects.

Before coming to William & Mary in 2003, he was curator of American culture at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, where he curated or co-curated many exhibits, most notably Rock & Soul: Social Crossroads (2000 - ) and This is Your Childhood, Charlie Brown: Children and American Culture 1945-1970.

The two professors were among 36 applicants chosen from a pool of 443, encompassing 13 states and the District of Columbia, as well as Canada, France and Russia. They represent humanistic scholarship in history, literature, philosophy, anthropology, art history, classics, musicology and religion.

Geoffrey Harpham, director of the National Humanities Center, said, “I look forward to welcoming the fellows of 2013-14. They are an exceptional group with a fascinating array of scholarly interests that should make for a stimulating year at the center.”The National Humanities Center awarded more than $1.5 million in individual fellowship grants to enable scholars to take leave from their normal academic duties and pursue research at the center. This funding is made possible by the center’s endowment, by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and by contributions from alumni and friends of the Center.

According to a press release, the National Humanities Center, located in the Research Triangle Park of North Carolina, is a privately incorporated independent institute for advanced study in the humanities. Since 1978, the center has awarded fellowships to more than 1,200 scholars in the humanities, whose work at the center has resulted in the publication of more than 1,400 books in all fields of humanistic study. The center also sponsors programs to strengthen the teaching of the humanities in secondary and higher education.